Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Shed Skin 0.0.30

I have just released version 0.0.30 of Shed Skin, an experimental (restricted) Python-to-C++ compiler.

Most importantly, this release adds (efficient) support for user-defined classes in generated extension modules, which should make it much easier to integrate compiled code within larger projects. More specifically, compiled classes can now be instantiated on the CPython side, and instances can be passed freely between CPython and Shed Skin without any conversion taking place. (Instances of builtin classes are still (recursively) copied, though, at the moment..)

Another major improvement was contributed by FFAO: a new 'set' implementation, directly based on the CPython code. While I haven't tested it on many benchmarks, it is clear that is now much faster, and on one benchmark it even outperforms CPython on my system by about 35%.

Other notable changes include complex number support, mapping None to NULL instead of 0 and printing it as 'None', as well as an important type inference fix.

With support for user-defined classes in extension modules, it looks like all the major pieces are now there to do a 0.1 release. The only thing I'd really like to do before that, is to improve support for the 'os' module. Please let me know if you'd like to help out here! Hopefully, with many details out of the way, I can have another good look at type inference for 0.2..